The tobacco industry involves manufacture of various products, such as cigarettes, cigarillos, cigars and filter rods, which may be generally classified as rod-shaped articles. The “rod-shaped” term relates both to final and intermediate products that undergo further manufacturing processes. The manufactured rod-shaped articles may be transported between consecutive machines of the manufacturing line or stored. The products are often transported between consecutive sites of the manufacturing line, or stored, in parallelepiped-shaped trays having two open walls. These trays are filled utilizing machines for filling trays with rod-shaped articles, so called “tray fillers.” A problem in construction of the tray filler is appropriate functioning of the filling system, which may be responsible for distributing a specified amount of rod-shaped articles into consecutively supplied trays and arranging the consecutive layers of articles so that the articles form a honeycomb-like structure. After filling up of every consecutive trays, the filling system may be closed. After the closure, no more articles should move into to the area below the filling system.
There are known various filling systems, for example from the German patent application DE 198 29 735 and US patent documents U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,487,001 and 4,489,534.
Another method for blocking articles in the filling system is disclosed in GB 1 186 348 A publication.
The documents presented above do not provide a solution which would provide an appropriate arrangement of higher layers of a tray, in particular due to, even after closing of the filling system, single articles may still may pass through the filling system.